At the press briefing for the Singapore Bicentennial 2019, Yale-NUS College President Tan Tai Yong spoke about how the anniversary event will allow people to understand how Singapore came to be as a nation in 1965, including what shaped it and what challenges earlier generations had to overcome. President Tan is a member of the 16-member advisory panel for the event, which will mark 200 years since Sir Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore in 1819.

Media reports noted President Tan saying that the event was important in educating “a country and its citizens”, and it was not meant to be a “rose-tinted” account of events of the last two centuries, but rather a way to “capture the full essence and the full complexities of what happened”. President Tan added that it is important to go beyond 1819, to get the “full complexities of history” because new research is “pushing the boundaries of knowledge further backwards”.